Critical Role's 'Daggerheart' Open Playtest Starts In March

On March 12th, Critical Role's Darrington Press will be launching the open playtest for Daggerheart, their new fantasy TTRPG/

Using cards and two d12s, the system plays on 'the dualities of hope and fear'. The game is slated for a 2025 release.

Almost a year ago, we announced that we’ve been working hard behind-the-scenes on Daggerheart, our contribution to the world of high-fantasy tabletop roleplaying games.

Daggerheart is a game of brave heroics and vibrant worlds that are built together with your gaming group. Create a shared story with your adventuring party, and shape your world through rich, long-term campaign play.

When it’s time for the game mechanics to control fate, players roll one HOPE die and one FEAR die (both 12-sided dice), which will ultimately impact the outcome for your characters. This duality between the forces of hope and fear on every hero drives the unique character-focused narratives in Daggerheart.

In addition to dice, Daggerheart’s card system makes it easy to get started and satisfying to grow your abilities by bringing your characters’ background and capabilities to your fingertips. Ancestry and Community cards describe where you come from and how your experience shapes your customs and values. Meanwhile, your Subclass and Domain cards grant your character plenty of tantalizing abilities to choose from as your character evolves.

And now, dear reader, we’re excited to let you know that our Daggerheart Open Beta Playtest will launch globally on our 9th anniversary, Tuesday, March 12th!

We want anyone and everyone (over the age of 18, please) to help us make Daggerheart as wonderful as possible, which means…helping us break the game. Seriously! The game is not finished or polished yet, which is why it’s critical (ha!) to gather all of your feedback ahead of Daggerheart’s public release in 2025.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm curious to what extent, if any, Daggerheart will become a gateway for many D&D players into the "design tech" and philosophy of many indie TTRPGs, especially more narrative ones.

 

[TwoSix]

That is totally not the way I'd play it. It sort of reminds me of Ricky Bobby and "if you're not first, you're last."

How big an impact the loss of maximum Hope sort of depends on how often you're up at that total. Without playing the game, I don't know. At this point, I see the mechanic as being the analog for Blades in the Dark's Trauma: it's how close is your character to finishing their story and having to retire?

If I'm playing in a game, I'm taking that loss as a life-changing impact and seeing how my character reacts to it next. YMMV.

I mean, just boiling it down to nuts and bolts, how often should a character be sitting at max Hope? The systems to incentivize spending it freely, considering it should be coming in pretty fast.

 

[SteveC]

I mean, just boiling it down to nuts and bolts, how often should a character be sitting at max Hope? The systems to incentivize spending it freely, considering it should be coming in pretty fast.

In thinking about it, I'd say the most important thing is to be able to have enough Hope to do a Team-up, which is three. If I went below that, I'd be thinking about heading out. Otherwise, it seems to flow pretty fast so I don't see it as an issue. Now in play ... that might be different but from watching the Critical Role playtest, it didn't seem like they hit that total very often.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Because they became a liability. Next fight they are more likely to go down again because they have less hope, which endangers the whole team and leads to more scars. Tactically, the blaze of glory option is always the one you should use. So “one character dies” would be the standard outcome of any tough fight.

Wouldn't that be a plus to some DMs? I thought lots of DMs here complain about how hard it is to kill PCs??

 

[TwoSix]

Maybe a Scar can grant a bonus, as well as dropping max Hope?

Off the top of my head, maybe one extra Experience per Scar (has to be an experience related to the scarring event)?

Or maybe something like a bonus when the DM uses Fear, since the Scar represents the character perservering when the chips are down?

 

[nyvinter]

It does give a bonus: the character is now alive.

This might also be a balancing thing where low wound threshold mages get more abilities on their domain cards compared to a high wound threshold warrior.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

DnD Shorts has pretty decent (and short!) review. It is somewhat positive, but also highlight several potential problem areas. Hope and fear generation seems to be a bit exceeive, so there is constantly more than you can spend. It is not rules light, there is a ton of rules and it pretty complex. But most damning criticism to me was the fact that due how the actions are generated, sometimes it is optimal for a PC to do nothing at all in combat. This really should never be the case.

 

[TwoSix]

But most damning criticism to me was the fact that due how the actions are generated, sometimes it is optimal for a PC to do nothing at all in combat. This really should never be the case.

I don't know. To me, that feels like an assertion (PCs should always be taking actions) masquerading as a principle. I can think of lots in fights in D&D where only having a few of the PCs as the primary actors made the most sense, and the other PCs were just dodging or hiding for the sake of doing something.

 

[DragonLancer]

I was discussing this with one of my players yesterday because of that video. We both felt that it depended on the encounter. In the two fights I put them through in our first playtest, the Wizard, for example, cast one spell and then stayed out of the fight. In the second fight, against 6 bandit types, he did nothing but hide on the stairs. The fighting types did the work and he helped with the non-combat encounters instead.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Some of my personal dislikes:

Action rolls are 2d12 but attack rolls are d20! Why? This is system aesthetically jarring, I hate this! Use the same formula for both!
Edit: It seems I was confused, and players roll 2d12 whilst GM rolls d20. That's less bad, but I still dislike the asymmetry.

How the damage works seems unnecessarily convoluted. You roll the damage, and compare it to thresholds. So far so good. However, then instead of the thresholds actually corresponding different types of wounds, they're just used to convert the damage to hit point damage. This is inelegant. If the different thresholds do nothing more interesting than help to convert bigger damage numbers into smaller HP numbers they seems like an unnecessary step. Either use D&D style direct HP pools, or if thresholds are used then let them produce actually meaningfully different types of wounds.

I don't like how the armour works. This game has already enough things to track. It also is hella weird how your armour can be rendered completely useless after few hits. And as many armours incur penalties for wearing them, the logical thing is to unequip them after they've been used up. Characters constantly equipping and unequipping armour this way would be weird and jarring. I think armour providing simple passive damage reduction would be more logical and easier to use. I get that making decisions whether to use the resource ort not is potentially interesting, but this game has enough of that already, and this is not particularly interesting decision. If it is a big hit you use it.